Elvis Presley

Movie fans come to Toronto to get an early peek at the year’s awards heavyweights. I didn’t see a knockout punch, but I saw some strong contenders — and in a couple cases, I just got bludgeoned.

Directors Benny Safdie (“Uncut Gems”) and David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) faced off with competing docudramas about the sufferings of two professional brawlers whose careers peaked in the ’90s — i.e., new “Raging Bulls” for today’s nostalgists. “The Smashing Machine” is a solo effort from the younger Safdie brother after making a string of energetic cult hits with his sibling, Josh. It stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as MMA fighter Mark Kerr, who could beat almost anyone inside the octagon but struggled to conquer his own demons at home with his then-wife, Dawn (Emily Blunt).

Based on the names and talent involved, I was expecting anything other than what I got: a conventional biopic. Its one bit of flair is a commitment to looking as though it was filmed on VHS. But projected in Imax, it just looked dreary (as did Johnson’s hairpiece). I’ll go another round with it in a more apropos ring.

Michôd’s “Christy” shares several of the same touchstones — the bloodrush of victory, a bruising domestic life, a distracting wig — but gender-flipped. Sydney Sweeney throws a convincing jab as Christy Martin, the first female boxer to make the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” A lesbian from a conservative West Virginia family, she was pressured to hide her sexuality by wearing pastel pink in the ring and marrying her much older, emotionally abusive male coach, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). The script only has a few ideas under its belt, but they’re effective, particularly our dawning recognition that while Christy thinks she’s fighting to prove her worth, she’s really fighting for the patriarchy.

Sweeney is good, even when the leaden dialogue does her a disservice. It’s her first substantial, serious part since 2023’s underseen “Reality” and she seizes the opportunity to be talked about as something other than the internet’s most polarizing ingenue. (Social media is forever singling out one young actress to be damned now and redeemed later, sigh.) As for Foster, who first snagged my attention as the pathetic loon in “Alpha Dog,” he knows how to play a hiss-worthy heel. You spend “Christy” aching to see him get socked in the face. If you need him to take more punishment, he’s just as vile in another TIFF title, “Motor City.”

Tessa Thompson in the movie “Hedda.”

(Prime Video)

At this year’s festival, ladies in corsets did more damage than gals in padded gloves. My favorite mean girl — perhaps even my favorite film of the festival — was Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” a devilish and dynamic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” in which the lead character (played by a fantastic Tessa Thompson) starts firing off her daddy’s old pistols as soon as the opening credits. DaCosta, who also adapted the play into a script, restages the action so that the chaos all takes place during a giant, drunken bacchanal at a rented mansion Hedda can’t afford. Thompson’s scheming newlywed manipulates the other characters with the confidence of a queen who controls all the pieces on the board, but every so often she simply has to flip the table over. The spirit is faithful; the subtext is fresh.

“Mārama,” a striking feature debut by Taratoa Stappard, bills itself as a Māori gothic and the combination works. In 1859 England, a white-passing woman from New Zealand named Mary (Ariāna Osborne) has sailed halfway around the world seeking information about her parents. The globe-trotting lord Sir Cole (Toby Stephens) strong-arms her into becoming his niece’s governess, calling the Māori a “magnificent people” while amusing his guests with parlor room reenactments of whale-hunting expeditions done with massive puppets. “Mārama” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a good ride with first-rate cinematography and production design and a story with one or two more surprises than we expect.

Similarly, “Honey Bunch,” co-directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, is another manor-bound thriller that toys with familiar tropes. An amnesiac bride (Grace Glowicki, a go-for-broke oddball who always gets my attention) arrives at an isolated and secretive trauma center where everyone seems to be screwing with her memories, including her shady husband (Ben Petrie). Straightaway, we have our suspicions about how this is going to go. The first half of the film doesn’t deviate from the formula — it’s a little dull — but the second half is a superb right hook.

Guillermo del Toro’s grisly, occasionally great “Frankenstein,” shot in Toronto and the U.K., hews more faithfully to Mary Shelley’s novel than the 1931 Boris Karloff classic, scrapping the mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers and salvaging the wraparound story of an ambitious explorer marooned in the the Arctic ice. But it’s still very much Del Toro’s own monster. One of his smartest adjustments is retooling the romantic heroine, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), from the ideal childhood sweetheart to a science-loving pacifist with limited patience for egomaniacs like Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein. Costume designer Kate Hawley makes Goth look like an exotic beetle with antenna-ish plumes sticking out of her hair.

Jacob Elordi as the Creature in the movie “Frankenstein.”

(Ken Woroner / Netflix)

Jacob Elordi’s creature amps up the pathos a tad too much for my taste, but there’s no denying how much he’s invested in the role, or how well Del Toro’s critiques about narcissistic inventors suit the present day. Still, Del Toro knows there’s a time and place to boast: At the film’s Toronto premiere at the Princess of Wales Theatre, he playfully accused his local below-the-line crew of being too humble and made them stand up for applause. “Stop being so Canadian,” he teased.

Del Toro told the audience that when he first saw Karloff’s creation as a boy, he thought to himself, “That’s my messiah, that’s the guy I’m going to follow like Jesus.” But the prize for the most idol-worshipping film in the festival belongs to Baz Luhrmann’s “EPiC,” which stands for “Elvis Presley in Concert.” Constructed from hours of previously unseen live footage from Presley’s stint in Las Vegas, its rapturous showing felt like attending the church of Elvis.

Luhrmann insists that “EPiC” is neither a concert film nor a documentary. I don’t see the issue with calling it either, but it’s also fair to consider it a companion piece to Luhrmann’s 2022 “Elvis.” It certainly shows that Austin Butler’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the King wasn’t one rhinestone over the top. Here, the real Presley is charismatic as hell, and looks great beaded in sanctified sweat. Whenever he throws a damp scarf into the audience, the women go so crazy you’d think it was the Shroud of Turin.

Luhrmann continues to be outraged that Col. Tom Parker constricted Presley’s artistic growth by parking him in the city of buffet tables rather than letting him tour the world. Presley only did one week of international concerts during his entire career: five shows in Canada, two of them just a 10-minute drive from my theater. You can hear Presley’s resentment toward the better-traveled (and at the time, better-respected) artists stealing his spot on the charts. “It’s so dry in here, I feel like I’ve got Bob Dylan in my mouth,” he jokes. Later, he slings a guitar around his neck to strum “Little Sister,” and then speeds up the tempo and starts belting the Beatles’ “Get Back,” a subtle dig that the boys from Britain weren’t always that original.

A scene from the movie “A Useful Ghost.”

(TIFF)

Speaking of, I can’t wrap up my final dispatch from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival without mentioning the most creative Oscar contender I saw all week: “A Useful Ghost,” which won the Grand Prix of Critics’ Week at Cannes and will be Thailand’s entry for an Academy Award. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s arch hybrid of horror, comedy, romance and political thriller starts when a self-described “academic ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) discovers that his new vacuum cleaner is possessed. From there, the movie defies prediction at every turn.

I ducked into “A Useful Ghost” on a whim, wondering how it would pair with TIFF’s world premiere of “Dust Bunny,” a nice and nasty Roald Dahl-esque adventure in which a little girl hires Mads Mikkelsen to battle a man-eating monster under her bed. I came out of the theater abuzz with energy. Even though some of this season’s noisiest awards hopefuls are rooted in classic genres, there are still directors making movies that feel entirely new — and still audiences delighted to cheer for a big swing.

Two and a half years before he died, Elvis Presley sat on the floor of a walk-in closet at the Las Vegas Hilton and discussed a project that might have changed the course of his life.

The meeting, as recounted by Presley’s longtime friend Jerry Schilling, put the King of Rock and Roll face to face with Barbra Streisand, who’d come to see Presley perform at the Hilton in March 1975 then sought an audience after the show to float an idea: Would Presley be interested in appearing opposite Streisand in her remake of “A Star Is Born”?

At the time of the duo’s conversation — Schilling says that he, Presley’s pal Joe Esposito and Streisand’s boyfriend Jon Peters squeezed into the closet with the stars in a search for some quiet amid the commotion backstage — it had been six years since Presley had last played a dramatic role onscreen; Streisand’s pitch so tantalized him, according to Schilling, that they ended up talking for more than two hours about the movie.

“We even ordered in some food,” Schilling recalls.

Presley, of course, didn’t get the part famously played by Kris Kristofferson — a casualty, depending on who you ask, of Streisand’s insistence on top billing or of the unreasonable financial demands of Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. (In her 2023 memoir, Streisand wonders whether the character of a self-destructive musician was in the end “a little too close to his own life” for Elvis’ comfort.)

Whatever the case, Schilling believes that the disappointment over “A Star Is Born” set Presley on a path of poor decision-making that effectively tanked his career before his tragic death at age 42 on Aug. 16, 1977 — 48 years ago this weekend.

“That was the last time I saw the twinkle in my friend’s eye,” Schilling, 83, says of the sit-down with Streisand.

An intriguing new box set commemorates the King’s final burst of creativity. Released this month in five-CD and two-LP editions, “Sunset Boulevard” collects the music Presley recorded in Los Angeles between 1972 and 1975, including the fruit of one session held just days before the meeting about “A Star Is Born.” These were the studio dates that yielded songs like “Separate Ways,” which Elvis cut amid the crumbling of his marriage to Priscilla Presley, and “Burning Love,” his last Top 10 pop hit, as well as 1975’s “Today” LP, an exemplary showcase of Presley’s latter-day blend of rock, country and blue-eyed soul.

Is yet another repackaging of Presley’s music really something to get excited about? The Elvis industry has never not been alive and well over the half-century since he died; in just the last few years, we’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s splashy big-screen biopic, the latest book from the singer’s biographer Peter Guralnick (this one about Parker) and not one but two documentaries about the so-called ’68 comeback special that heralded Presley’s return to live performance after nearly a decade of film work.

More gloomily, “Sunset Boulevard” arrives as Priscilla Presley — who got her own biopic from director Sofia Coppola in 2023 — is making headlines thanks to an ugly legal battle with two former business partners she brought on to aid in managing the Presley brand. (The feud itself follows the sudden death two years ago of Priscilla and Elvis’ only child, Lisa Marie Presley.)

Yet the new box offers an opportunity to ponder the curious position Elvis found himself in once the glow of the comeback special had faded: a rock and roll pioneer now strangely removed from the culture he did as much as anyone to invent.

“Sunset Boulevard’s” title, which the set shares with Billy Wilder’s iconic 1950 movie, can’t help but evoke the spoiled grandeur of an aging showbiz legend. It also refers to the physical location of RCA Records’ West Coast headquarters at 6363 Sunset Blvd., across the street from Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome. Now the site of the L.A. Film School, the building is where the Rolling Stones recorded “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and Jefferson Airplane made “Surrealistic Pillow” — and where Presley set up in the early ’70s after cutting most of his ’60s movie soundtracks at Radio Recorders near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.

Jerry Schilling at his home in West Hollywood.

(JSquared Photography / For The Times)

By 1972, rock had long since evolved beyond the crucial influence Elvis exerted at the beginning of his career. Nor was the King particularly dialed into what was happening in music while he was busy in Hollywood.

“We weren’t as exposed as much as I wish we would’ve been to everything going on,” Schilling says on a recent afternoon at his home high in the hills above Sunset Plaza. A core member of Elvis’ fabled Memphis Mafia, Schilling has lived here since 1974, when Elvis bought the place from the TV producer Rick Husky and gifted it to Schilling for his years of loyal friend-ployment.

“When you’re doing movies, you’re up at 7 in the morning and you’re in makeup by 8,” Schilling continues. “You work all day and you come home — you’re not necessarily putting on the latest records.”

More than the growling rock lothario of Presley’s early days — to say nothing of the shaggy psychedelic searchers who emerged in his wake — what the RCA material emphasizes is how expressive a ballad singer Elvis had become in middle age. Schilling says the singer’s romantic troubles drew him to slower, moodier songs like “Separate Ways,” “Always on My Mind” and Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” the last of which he delivers in a voice that seems to tremble with regret. (Presley had to be cajoled into singing the uptempo “Burning Love,” according to Schilling, who notes with a laugh that “when it became a hit, he loved it.”)

But in the deep soulfulness of this music you’re also hearing the rapport between Presley and the members of his live band, with whom he recorded at RCA instead of using the session players who’d backed him in the ’60s. Led by guitarist James Burton, the TCB Band — that’s Taking Care of Business — was assembled ahead of Elvis’ first engagement at Las Vegas’ International Hotel, which later became the Las Vegas Hilton; indeed, one of “Sunset Boulevard’s” more fascinating features is the hours of rehearsal tape documenting Presley’s preparation in L.A. for the Vegas shows that began in 1969.

The sound quality is murky and the performances fairly wobbly, as in a take on “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” where Elvis can’t quite seem to decide on a key. Yet it’s a thrill to listen in as the musicians find their groove — a kind of earthy, slow-rolling country-gospel R&B — in an array of far-flung tunes including “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” even the Pointer Sisters’ “Fairytale.”

The RCA Records building on Sunset Boulevard in an undated photo.

(RCA Records)

In one rehearsal recorded Aug. 16, 1974, Elvis cues his band to play the Ewan MacColl ballad made famous by Roberta Flack: “‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Friggin’ Face,’” he calls out as we hear the players warming up. Then they all lock in for a closely harmonized rendition of the song so pretty there’s something almost spooky about it.

Sitting next to the balcony he was standing on when he got the phone call alerting him to the news of Presley’s death, Schilling takes clear pleasure in spinning well-practiced yarns about his years with Elvis: the time John Lennon told him to tell Presley that he grew out his sideburns in an attempt to look like the King, for instance, or the audition where Elvis took a flier on a relatively unknown drummer named Ronnie Tutt who ended up powering the TCB Band.

He’s more halting when he talks about the end of his friend’s life and about what he sees as the lack of a serious artistic challenge that might have sharpened Elvis’ focus. Staying on in Vegas a bit too long, making so-so records in a home studio set up at Graceland — these weren’t enough to buoy the man he calls a genius. Does Schilling know if Presley saw “A Star Is Born” when it came out at the end of 1976?

He considers the question for a good 10 seconds. “I don’t know,” he finally says. He started tour managing the Beach Boys that year and was spending less time with Presley. “He never mentioned it to me. I wish I knew. There’s probably nobody alive now who could say.”

Since opening at London Excel last Friday, Layered Reality’s Elvis Experience show has been torn to shreds by punters, who have complained about the visual effects and the cost of tickets

Milo Boyd is a Digital Travel reporter who covers aviation news, the environment, the cruise industry and much else including travel tips, bargain holiday suggestions and inspirational global trips.

“It makes me feel sick.” Not the most glowing of reviews from Ann, a pensioner who opted to leave the Elvis Evolution experience as soon as the mind-bending, sound-warping, completely Elvis-free first half had finished.

Since opening at London Excel last Friday, the show has been torn to shreds by punters like Ann, who had been expecting to see a hologram of the King, only to settle for a selfie with a cardboard cutout. One pensioner was so irate at the steep ticket price he was dragged from the venue after shouting ‘b****cks’ over the live finale.

A tough opening week then for Layered Reality, a London-based events company that combines “the latest in performance technology with live actors and feature quality sets” to produce “the future of entertainment”, or so its website says at least.

When I visited Elvis Evolution on the grey Wednesday afternoon after its opening, I was taken on a “unique immersive” ride into the world of Elvis.

It was just more the parts when he was stuck in a Las Vegas penthouse suite, blasting his mind apart with a diet of nightly shows, hamburgers and Quaaludes, than the bit when he was hot and good at performing.

READ MORE: Baffled Elvis fans dub ’embarrassing’ event the ‘new Willy Wonka experience’

It begins in a 50s-style diner-come-holding pen, where guests are invited to arrive early to enjoy a £10 King and Tonic or a Paramount Pretzel.

“They’ve run out of ice cream, so the Pepsi Floats are off,” Cambridge man Carl told me. He’d had to schlep over the Thames on the IFS Cloud Cable Car from Greenwich after discovering the official car park was closed.

Having had a good moan about the prices as we queued for the first of about ten times that afternoon, we shuffled into the first scene – a recreation of Elvis’s dressing room – and then around it for about 20 minutes. A generous timeslot, given the room was about as faithful a creation of the 50s as the (admittedly incredible) OK Diner on the A1.

And then the lights dim and the conceit begins. A washed-up Elvis is refusing to leave his dressing room and hit the stage for his iconic 1968 NBC Comeback Special. A distressed show manager tells us not to worry, the King will be out soon, and that security guards are on site both for our and the staff’s safety. A little on the nose, given the pensioner dragging that took place just days ago.

Shockingly, the stage manager is wrong. Elvis doesn’t actually appear for the entire duration of the show, aside from in short projected clips of old performances, briefly recreated as an uncanny AI figurine and, at one weird point, as a comic book superhero.

After tempting punters with a hologram Presley just like ABBA Voyage down the road, Layered Reality made the “creative decision not to mimic Elvis’s performances” with the tech. Or hire one of the tens of thousands of impersonators who would’ve probably done a great job. Elvis has not just left the building, he was never in it.

Instead, we get a supporting cast of four actors who whisk us out of the NBC studio to Elvis’ childhood and then on a whirlwind tour back to the moment the King reclaimed his crown.

“I couldn’t hear a bloody thing,” one man told me before following after Ann at halftime and making for the DLR. The sound is admittedly warped and poorly mixed, with the head mics dropping in and out, making the story very hard to follow. “What the hell is going on!?” Catherine, Carl’s wife, asked me as she slurps on a Blue Suede cocktail.

As someone who has served as an elf in the early years of Lapland UK, I know how difficult it is to keep grinning while guiding ripped-off feeling families to the right Father Christmas’ cabin. Or in this case, performing for a visibly bored crowd of pensioners, some of whom have spent up to £300 on VIP passes that get you three “free” drinks and a seat in the finale performance.

The actors gave it their all and were the best thing about the show. But they were fighting a losing battle. The script is bad, the effects are weird, and the sound is not quite ear-splitting enough to mask their Mississippi via London accents.

We are likely to get more and more of this kind of thing as the film industry continues its contraction and immersive events take over. According to Gensler Research Institute’s 2025 Immersive Entertainment & Culture Industry Report, the global market for immersive entertainment was valued at £98bn – and it’s projected to reach £351bn by 2030.

Elvis Evolution has been likened to the catastrophic Wonka and Bridgerton experiences, but that’s a little unfair. Layered Reality has certainly thrown some cash, time and expertise at the event, it’s just not enough.

The show comes to a climax in a small auditorium where groups of elderly people (who clearly have trouble keeping on their feet but only paid £75 for the cheapest tickets) are ushered into the standing pen, while the VIPs enjoy cinema seats at the back.

As has been widely reported elsewhere, Elvis does not appear here as expected. He is beamed onto a flat screen behind a live band, who are pretending to play. It’s a limp way to finish things off, yet it gets people dancing, clapping and smiling for the first time.

It always seemed to me that Elvis was great in spite of his corny origin story, the cringeworthy PR ops he was pressured into and his vast back catalog of sickly sweet love songs. He was great because of his incredible musical talent, which stayed with him until the very end, when he was still able to summon choirs of angels from his broken, slug-like body.

Layered Reality probably should’ve realised this, cut out most of the bells and whistles, and actually hired an Elvis to sing a few of his tunes.

A spokesperson for the company said: “Elvis Evolution has been praised by Elvis fans and newcomers alike — but it’s not a traditional concert or hologram show. From the outset of development, we made a deliberate decision to explore the most powerful and authentic ways to tell Elvis’ story.

“This major scale production brings together a cast of 28 performers and over 300 skilled professionals across design, production, and visual effects.

“Elvis Evolution is a multisensory experience, where technology plays a powerful supporting role — but the show doesn’t attempt to recreate Elvis’ performances. Instead, it joyfully celebrates the ones he gave us. We’re incredibly proud of what’s been created, and of how it’s reconnecting people with Elvis in new and meaningful ways.”

Elvis Presley’s worn Omega wristwatch, gifted to him by Johnny Cash, sold for $103,700 this week.

Goldin, a leading sports and pop culture memorabilia auction house, sold the engraved timepiece as part of its inaugural music memorabilia auction, which closed Wednesday night. Other high-selling items included a D.A. Millings & Son custom suit worn by John Lennon in 1963 ($102,480), a signed copy of Led Zeppelin’s album “Presence” ($19,520) and George Harrison’s sunglasses ($47,590). Goldin also set a new sale record for a type 1 photo — or photo developed from an original negative within two years of when the picture was taken— of rapper Tupac Shakur, which sold for $10,370, according to the auction house.

Though sports and trading card auctions are Goldin’s “bread and butter,” the company is venturing more into pop culture, said head of revenue Dave Amerman. This transition is documented in Goldin’s Netflix show, “King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch,” which premiered in 2023 and was just renewed for a third season.

“We realized that we get so many music items and we build them into our pop culture sales, we just want to separate it and make its own event out of it,” Amerman told The Times.

Many of the Beatles items belonged to music promoter Chris Agajanian, who’s been building his collection for more than 40 years. Agajanian owns more than 2,000 pieces of Beatles memorabilia and signed letters of provenance for many of the items in the Goldin sale.

The music auction also included more than 500 concert posters graded by the Certified Guaranty Company, the leader in comic book grading. Poster subjects ranged from the Grateful Dead and the Beatles to Sonic Youth and Blink-182.

In 2020, Goldin sold one of the most expensive albums of all time: a copy of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Double Fantasy” that Lennon unwittingly signed for his assassin, Mark David Chapman, just before the Beatle was shot in 1980. It went for $900,000.

Additionally, the auction house holds the record for most expensive toy sold at an auction: a 1979 prototype action figure of “Star Wars” bounty hunter Boba Fett that went for more than $1 million in 2024.

Goldin’s Hollywood Props & Memorabilia auction, featuring Harrison Ford’s “Indiana Jones” whip, a “Star Wars” Stormtrooper prototype helmet and George Reeves’ “Superman” suit, is currently live. The auction closes Aug. 6.